Thursday, August 25, 2011

A few days ago, Combat and Careers developer Steven Engle hit the forums with a post about the future of the Engineer and Magus classes. These two careers have received some attention lately, but something even bigger is planned. Read on for more details.

Turrets/Daemons - The current plan is to move ahead with the idea of 4 turrets/daemons. We are working on getting art assets to support this.

- Turrets/Daemons will be instant cast.- They will have one ability on a 1.5s timer much like an auto attack. It will deal magical damage.- Turrets/Daemons will be immune to KD/Stagger.- Turrets/Daemons will inherit all stats from items 100%- Half of the Turret/Daemons will have an offensive purpose and the other half Defensive purpose- Cooldown on turrets/daemons will be 30s and each will have an up time of 10s.- During the 10s, the turret/daemons will have an aura that either effects the enemies or allies nearby.- Summoning turrets/daemons will be low cost, we want them to be part of a rotation and strategic.- The turrets/daemons will despawn when a new one is cast or the timer runs out.DefensiveAoE Snare/damage fieldAoE Auto Attack speed decreasing debuffOffensiveAoE group Range increaserAoE group damage buff (increases damage by a percentage and that extra damage is credited to the Engineer)

Those are some major changes, considering the classes are based around their turret. The goal here is to make these careers have more group utility and be more mobile. The new turret effects are a big step up in the utility department. My favorite part is that an extra damage generated by the turret effect is credited to the Engineer. The AoE snare and Auto Attack decreaser should provide some interesting options for defense against melee trains.

Lastly is the range increaser. I am not a big fan of this one or any dynamic range modifiers. Having enemies be suddenly in or out of range with no movement seems pretty jarring. We'll see how it goes though. As for mobility, all of the turrets are now instant case. No more 3 sec cast or needing a tactic to make it shorter. Speaking of tactics, some of them will also be redesigned which gives more potential for improvement.

On the downside, the turret only lives for 10 seconds. They do not share a cooldown, so you can always have one up even if the effect is not useful at the time. Another negative about this change is that we will lose the 20% damage buff. It's usefulness was questionable due to mobility concerns though.

Overall, it could be a pretty good change for the Engineer and Magus. I think it will take some actual play time to get a better idea about how they will work. Currently, there is no set timeline for these changes, I am hoping for 1.4.5 though.